Registered office: A-1445/6, Indira Nagar, Lucknow; party registered in 1998On the spot: No party board or banner. The house belongs to D K Yadav, a retired employee of UP Electricity Board, who is also a co-founder and the general secretary of the party.

parties which have not contested any election since 2005 and exist mostly on paper.

D K Yadav, 70, said the party he co-founded has been inactive for more than two years. He claimed it had 36 office-bearers once but admitted it has never held a meeting since 2013 or contested an election. It has never done an audit either, said Yadav, while stressing the party had rarely received any substantial donation to the tune of Rs 20,000.

Yadav took voluntary retirement from a job of senior operator in the Electricity Board about 20 years ago to enter politics.

The inactivity in the party set in after the death of its founder-president, R C Jindal, who used to publish a Hindi newspaper from Allahabad. “We never contested any elections because we had not registered the party to contest elections. We registered it to spread political and social awareness,” Yadav said.

“The Election Commission is not doing the right thing. A political party is not all about contesting elections. If the commission asks us, this is what I will tell them. Ours was a party founded to spread political and social awareness among workers of the unorganised sector.”

Yadav said he also ran an unregistered trade union, Samajwadi Mazdoor Sabha, since 2000 but that too has become inactive.

He said the party had held meetings in at 18 districts of eastern UP after its registration but it could gather only 100 to 150 members at the time. “We never received any funds so there was no need to submit any audit reports. When we organised meetings, members were provided only travel fare and food. But now it has become so expensive to hold meetings, established parties spend Rs 25 lakh to 50 lakh on one meeting,” said Yadav.

Yadav said the last meeting in 2013 was at Swarn Jayanti Park in Lucknow. “After the death of Jindal, we failed to revive it. There were 36 members of the party’s executive but 12 of them are dead,” said Yadav.

Ramendra Singh

***

Tarai Kranti Dal

Letters to a party at an address where ‘there is none’

Ashok Sharma says his namesake may have one of the plots.

Registered office: 21/2, Indira Nagar, LucknowOn the spot: A white residential bungalow with green climbers covering its front. The house belongs to R K Singh, who is posted in Delhi, his domestic help said.

Savitri Maurya, the household help, suggested the party has given the wrong address. “I have been here for the last 20 years. During that period, there hasn’t been any political party’s office in this house,” she said, answering a question that has become familiar.

“We often get letters in the name of Tarai Kranti Dal,” she said, “and we have told people that its office is not here. This is the house of R K Singh. He is an officer with Railways in Delhi. He is not in Lucknow,” said Maurya, who did not provide Singh’s number.

Ramendra Singh

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Bhartiya Rajiv Congress

One address, two houses: they ‘never heard of any party’

The other house with the same number. Source: Avishek G dastidar

Registered office: A1/145, Arjun Nagar, Safdarjung Enclave, New DelhiOn the spot: Two houses marked A1/145 — at two places named in above address.

The address is misleading because both Arjun Nagar and Safdarjung Enclave have a house numbered A1-145.

The one in Arjun Nagar is a three-storey narrow building typical in unauthorised regularised colonies in Delhi.

The plot was once registered in the name of Ashok Sharma. A local builder who runs Star Properties, and who is named Ashok Sharma, said he has nothing to do with that property and it must have been a namesake. Sharma says he was with the BJP during Madanlal Khurana’s time. Later he joined Congress under Sheila Dikshit, not long before the party would lose power to AAP.

The other address, in Safdarjung Enclave, belongs to business Ranjeev Duggal, who owns a petrol pump in South Delhi. He says he has been living there since 2002.

Both Sharma and Duggal said never heard of Bhartiya Rajiv Congress.

Avishekh G Dastidar

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Rashtriya Hindu Sangathan

A one-man party that packed up after he ‘lost interest’

Ramesh Hiralal Sahu named his party after his initials. Source: Milind Ghatwai

Registered office: 30, Jati Colony, Ram Bagh, Indore, MPOn the spot: Home of founder, who had broken away from Shiv Sena in 2003

Ramesh Hiralal Sahu named Rashtriya Hindu Sangathan (RHS), the party he founded in 2003, because he wanted it to have his initials and also to sound like RSS, where he cut his political teeth.

The one-man party owed its existence to his frustration with the Shiv Sena of which he was the state level president of undivided Madhya Pradesh. “The party did not give me any funds and I had to run the show from my pocket to run the show across the huge state.”

The 70-year-old did not contest any election, neither when he was with Shiv Sena nor when he formed his own party. The party became defunct after 2006 “because I did not have any interest in running it. I am tired now and gave up after a major heart surgery.”

He spent five of the last 10 years at Omkareshwar to “find peace”.

When he was in Shiv Sena, he claimed, he played a spoiler to the BJP by fielding candidates in 38 seats in the 1993 assembly elections and eating into its votes. “They would not have voted for me so I did not contest any elections. I followed in the footsteps of Sena founder Balasaheb Thackeray who did not contest any elections. Balasaheb had asked me not to contest.”

He says Shiv Sena did not want to grow outside Maharashtra or else it would have won a few seats. “I never asked for funds, nor did any one bother to give me,” said Sahu who ran the MP unit once.

The septuagenarian, whose dress is inspired by Guru Govind Singh, said , “I am not a Sikh but I am a great admirer of the guru.”

His party’s symbol was two crossed swords and the sun, an image that is now visible only on the main gate of his large home in Rambagh locality of Indore. He removed the symbols because “banks stopped me giving me loans taking me for a usual politician. I hate politicians because they are corrupt, I am clean.”

He runs a hotel on the highway. “I earn my bread by selling bread, unlike politicians who snatch the bread of the poor.”

He began modestly by selling coal a few decades ago. His father was a labourer.

A bitter man now he still has some admires who drop in to celebrate his birthday. In his heydays he would lead saffron warriors in their agitation against Valentine’s Day.

Milind Ghatwai

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Rashtriya Matrabhoomi Party

Where party once ran, a clinic now: ‘Wound up for lack of funds’

Registered address: 1265 Sector 17C, Gurgaon, Haryana; registered in the 1990sOn the spot: Clinic of homoeopath, founder president who has since wound up party

The office of the Rashtriya Matrabhoomi Party used to be in a three storey independent bungalow in Gurgaon’s Sector 17, where now stands the clinic of the party’s president, who is a practitioner in homeopathy, Dr AM Mathur.

Dr Mathur said the party wound up “around five or six years ago” due to “lack of funding.

“We were nine members in the party, which was created in the 1990s, but I was the only person to have put in any funds at all. The other members did not make any contributions, and no third party showed any interest in our operations, so we eventually closed down,” he said.

Dr Mathur said the party was “never given a symbol” by the Election Commission but added that for the duration of its existence, all procedures, including filing of audits, were followed religiously.

Talking about the allegations on parties like his own, Dr Mathur added, “In order for us to get large contributions, we first have to have a political party. We no longer have that also, how can we have contributions?”

Registered address: 17 Akbar Road, New Delhi-110001On the spot: The official residence of Home Minister Rajnath Singh. When The Indian Express called Rajnath’s residence, the person who received the call said he was unaware of any such party.

Pavitra Hindustan Kaazhagam

…And one at CID office

Registered office: 11, Harish Chandra Mathur Lane, New Delhi-110001On the spot: It has been an office of the Jammu & Kashmir CID for nearly a decade. The Indian Express found an SSP-ranked officer in-charge of the premises, which also has a posse of armed personnel and other officers.